


silence sounding

by mouseymightymarvellous



Series: tales of gutsy shinobi [10]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Angst, F/M, Post-War, Requited Unrequited Love, Sakura's self-esteem issues, ShikaSaku Week 2019, falling apart to come together, wonky timelines
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-12
Updated: 2019-10-12
Packaged: 2020-12-09 17:16:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 5,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20998466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mouseymightymarvellous/pseuds/mouseymightymarvellous
Summary: They are creatures of duty. Liars and thieves and killers.They are creatures of love.It is six years after the war. They have built so much, there is so much they have yet failed to build.





	1. daylight so violent

Sakura’s avoiding him, and the worst part of it all is that Shikamaru can’t even call her out on it.

She’s walking arm-in-arm with Ino through the spring festival, laughing at Chōji’s jokes, her smile touching on him just the right amount for the kind of friends they’re known to be, fond but distant.

She’s leaned forward on the round table, fingers splayed, shoulders wide, pressing down with her certainty, enough to suffocate the grumbles of the oldest, most conservative council members to silence—making the case they’ve been fighting for for months now, with that soft violence of hers that makes Shikamaru burn.

She’s everywhere she’s supposed to be, always politely meeting Shikamaru’s gaze and adding to his points and passing the duties they share and trade off like nothing has happened, like she doesn’t let his looks fall off her like shadows from the midday sun, like they haven’t spent the last eleven months tangled up in corners and closets, like Shikamaru doesn’t still have the taste of her writhing under him trapped under his nails.

They were never anything, Sakura and Shikamaru. Just a secret. Just moments that maybe never were if Sakura won’t even look at him anymore.

Shikamaru still remembers the last time he kissed her the way flowers in the desert must remember the last rain: like he was made to wait for her, blooming under her touch.

She’d kissed him bloody, all teeth, and Shikamaru had whispered her name like a prayer into the altar of her thighs.

He doesn’t know what went wrong, he only knows what is missing.

Sakura walks away at the end of a meeting to spend time with friends who are more than just a man on the periphery of her social circle, their point finally won.

Shikamaru clenches his hands and doesn’t reach out to grab what was never really his to hold.

“Have you thought about the Elders’ suggestions?” Kāchan asks.

Shikamaru bites down on his reflexive snarl.

He loves his mother, and where once she would have snarled right back—or, more likely, smiled cooly at him and twisted his own emotions into a trap—she’s now more likely to fracture. She’s been so fragile since Tōsan’s death. For all they were a political match, his parents loved fiercely, and something in her is worn thin with the knowledge that all her acumen and skill and ferocity was not enough to keep him.

Shikamaru could despair for it, if he let himself.

He is too much his mother’s son.

He is too much his father’s son.

He doesn’t know what to do with it. All the Nara legacy rests on him, and he could have lived all his life without knowing in his bones how love can break you.

“I’m still thinking,” Shikamaru says, instead of anything else.

He doesn’t know if he could stand it, to speak the storm held within his ribcage into being.

“We just want what is best for you,” Kāchan says, and presses her calloused hand to his cheek.

Shikamaru leans into it for a moment. “I know.”

Tōsan is dead. Shikamaru is the Nara, now.

He doesn’t get to pick what is good for him alone.

Shikamaru finally catches her around the ankles, holding her still, and when he catches her gaze, too, he burns for the resolve in her green eyes, burns for the knowledge that she’s only here because she is finally willing to hear him out.

Just so he remembers who he has under his hands, Sakura flexes her chakra, and his shadows sputter for a breath under the light of her.

Like he could ever forget.

Like his best laid plans could be enough to ensnare her.

Shikamaru is many things, but stupid enough to not know the exact dimensions of Sakura’s worth is not one of them.

He resists the urge to run a lick of shadow up her calf to tease the back of her knee, and instead releases his jutsu.

She’s made it clear she’s not something for him to touch.

Sakura shifts her weight ever so slightly and Shikamaru tries to not take offence at the way she settles into a fighting stance, like the space between them is a battlefield.

“I never took you for a coward,” Shikamaru says, and could wince at the venom in his own voice, except for the way the fury is rising in him.

Sakura doesn’t even flinch at the barb, at the precisely aimed hit, like she was born to take damage and not move an inch.

Shikamaru swore, once, that he’d never make her. Never make her be that woman who swallowed pain like medicine.

He has rage running through him though, molten hot, and he hates her for turning him into this, for letting him become this.

He doesn’t understand.

“I’ve never lied about what I am,” Sakura grins back, all teeth. “Takes a coward to know a coward.”

She might as well have slapped him. Shikamaru’s cheeks flush and he bites down against the pain.

He doesn’t understand why that was a direct hit.

He isn’t the one who ran away.

“I wasn’t the one who ran away,” he says.

Sakura laughs, tossing her head back, baring her neck to him, completely unafraid and poisonous with it. “Run from what, Shikamaru? What was there to run from?”

Sakura’s teeth to his bottom lip and the sound of her laughter in the dark and the way she licks into his mouth like salvation and her heartbeat echoing in his chest and their legs tangled together and the green of her eyes and all the ways he would help her burn the world anew and what does she mean there was nothing between them when now she has carved a battlefield from their bones and is trying to burn him to ash?

“Why are you doing this?” Shikamaru asks, demands, pleads, like she’s dragged it from him, like she’s taken a blade to him, like there’s nothing left to him but all the ways she is missing from him.

“Why do you care now,” Sakura asks in return, “when none of it was real to you?”

Shikamaru doesn’t fall to his knees, but he doesn’t go after her when she breezes past him, out of the dark room and into the heavy summer heat.

The door snicks firmly shut behind her, leaving Shikamaru to his shadows.

Shikamaru considers the list of possible marriage candidates the Nara Elders have suggested.

They are, all of them, sensible, stable matches.

Shikamaru digs his fingers into the underside of his kitchen table.

Sakura has never sat at one of these chairs, her eyes bright as she teases him in the afternoon light streaming through the wide windows, hair messy from sleep and her laughter like syrup.

And now she never will.

Shikamaru carves his fingernails deeper and tries to remember that he is more than just a man and that nothing he could do would be enough to keep Sakura where she doesn’t want to stay.

He doesn’t understand what has happened.

Nothing has happened.

They were never anything real, just shadows passing in the night, and now memories are dreams that are evaporating in the morning sun.

Konoha’s bright new future is breaking over the horizon.

Shikamaru breaks with it.

He is too much his mother’s son.

He is too much his father’s son.

Duty weighs down his shoulders and he does not flinch.


	2. mud on our knees

Sakura wakes up one morning and she is six years out from winning a war and not in love.

She isn’t certain which of those two states of being are more surprising, really.

She swings her legs out of bed, feet to the cold floor, and stands up, stretching her hands over her head. Regardless, there is more work to do.

Sometimes, Sakura thinks that if you were to cut her open, she wouldn’t even bleed anymore. She’s shed too much blood for there to be any left in her veins, waded through oceans of it.

Not that anyone gets close enough to cut, anymore.

Orochimaru wanted immortality and Shishō carved her grandmother’s seal on her forehead and Jiraiya-sama wrote terrible books that live on, beloved. Naruto is on his way to being Hokage one day and the next time Sasuke crosses the border into Hi no Kuni he’ll be killed and Sakura doesn’t remember how to breathe without the burn of antiseptic soap or iron in her nose.

Someone tried to stab her through the back with a sword two months ago.

Sakura snapped his neck and walked away without a scar.

Her hands are cold and she doesn’t dream anymore.

Sakura is drunk the way she is never drunk anymore, her veins on fire, her laughter at Ino’s joke rolling through her like thunder, like she will only be this young for a moment, for a breath, for this impossible second of head-thrown-back screaming-against-tomorrow laughter.

Nothing touches Sakura anymore, but Shikamaru’s dark gaze caught on the smooth skin of her throat feels dangerous.

Sakura catches that dark gaze and licks the salt from the rim of her glass.

She wonders if Shikamaru knows she can see his fingers clenching around his own drink, his shoulders tense and hungry.

She wonders if Shikamaru wants her to know.

Sakura laughs harder, in love with being young and alive and unbloodied, and the rest of the night erupts like wildfire.

“What is this?” Sakura mouths along Shikamaru’s jaw, his hips trapped between her thighs as he pushes her higher against the wood of the bar’s back alley wall. “What do you want?”

Shikamaru catches the edge of her chest bindings and pulls, unravelling them under her shirt, giving away to skin under his hands.

“You,” he gasps against her lips, stealing her mouth back for more wine drunk kisses, “you for a night, just you like this.”

It’s shadows and moonlight behind the clouds and the blood flushing down Sakura’s cheeks to crawl across her breasts for Shikamaru to kiss.

It’s one night, it’s the rest of their lives.

Sakura is six years out from the war that still lives in her skin and no longer in love.

Shikamaru kisses her in another dark corner, and she wonders, as she drops to her knees, where the gods go when there are no more believers.

Shikamaru threads his fingers through her hair, her name on his lips, and she wonders where gods come from, and who they might have once been.

The floor is cold under her feet, but for the first time in an age, Sakura can feel it.


	3. and we dreamed in purples

Shikamaru is too practical to be a romantic.

He’ll keep claiming that to the end of his days.

Of the three of them—Chōji, Ino, Shikamaru—he thinks he’s the most practical. Ino dreams too big and Chōji dreams too soft. Shikamaru doesn’t dream of anything other than a slow ending, a warm home, a safe village. He certainly doesn’t dream of Sakura in his bed, spread across his sheets, her smile blooming with the dawn, all pinks and greens and skin and breath and vicious, violent, violet nights.

She’s never been there. There’s no reason that he should find her missing.

The list of names from the Nara Elders sits on his kitchen table, and he pretends to consider his options.

It would be easiest, to pick the name they think is the safest, the most secure.

Shikamaru is easygoing. He’s been on missions with people who he’d have rather seen dead, and brought them home alive. How hard could it be to survive a pretty wife? How hard could it be to do his duty?

He is too much his mother’s son.

He is too much his father’s son.

He wonders what Tōsan would say, if he were alive for Shikamaru to ask him.

He wonders what Kāchan would say, if Shikamaru were brave enough to ask her.

Shikamaru thinks he knows, and so he leaves the list face down and pretends that he doesn’t.

It’s another night and another bar and Shikamaru would be anywhere else, except he’s missed the last three weeks without a decent excuse, and his friends are all nosey assholes who won’t leave him alone if they think something’s the matter.

Terrible gossips, the lot of them.

Unfortunately, Sakura doesn’t mind watching enemies shatter under her touch, so she’s perched on a bar stool drinking something clear and poisonous, half an eye on the door, all the better to catch Shikamaru’s gaze when he slouches in.

Impossibly, her smile turns sharper, and she curls her tongue around her straw, just to dig it in deeper.

Bitch.

Murderess.

Executioner.

He wants to pull the straw from her mouth and kiss her until she’s sobbing with it.

Instead, Shikamaru lets Kiba slap him on the back in an unnecessary show of machismo and slips into a booth next to Chōji.

Chōji is Shikamaru’s only friend who is a good person, and so Chōji doesn’t bring up the fact that he caught Shikamaru near tears of rage and desperation nine days ago after another failed attempt to corner Sakura into telling him what the fuck is going on and why she wants him dead or the fact that Shikamaru is currently huddled into Chōji’s warm and solid side, seeking reassurance. Chōji hands him a shot, and Shikamaru takes it, relishing the burn in his throat and ignoring the burn in his eyes, in his veins.

Shikamaru makes it most of two hours, apparently passably miming decent cheer, before he bows out for the night, citing—truthfully—a mission the next morning.

He would pretend to not see Sakura letting herself be pressed up against a dark wall, except for the way she accidentally catches his eye and looks away, leaving him speared to the floor, apparently uncaring of the destruction she’s left to him.

Shikamaru steels his spine and heads home.

He doesn’t consider The List waiting for him.

He hasn’t the heart.

Sakura’s hair falls around them, blotting out the rest of the world.

Not that she isn’t enough. Not that she needs the curtain. All she needs is to curl herself over Shikamaru, soft curves and hands enough to remake the world, to hold him captive, to make everything else disappear.

“Can we pretend,” Sakura breathes into his open mouth, more gasp than words, “that this can last forever?”

Shikamaru wakes from a dream, from a memory, and cries into a pillow that has never known Sakura’s head that no, that no, that no they could not.

There is something brittle in Kāchan, now, even six years later. Maybe there always will be.

“Kāchan,” Shikamaru says, and drops to his knees at his mother’s feet.

She pulls him into her, lets him rest his cheek against the side of her leg, hands familiar and sure in his hair.

“Oh my beautiful, lovely boy,” she tells him, when he is done crying to her, “oh, what we have done to you. I am so sorry, my love, so sorry to ask what we ask of you.”

He is too much his mother’s son.

He is too much his father’s son.

“There is more to life than duty, Shikamaru,” she tells him. “There is love, too.”

Oh, he knows.

Oh, he knows, but the Nara love like tended gardens and not like wildfires.

Sakura burns in his veins.

They are all just creatures of duty.

They are all just creatures of love.

“You are my son,” Kāchan tells him, “there is no problem you cannot think your way out of.”

Tōsan has been dead six years, and parts of Kāchan with him.

Shikamaru doesn’t know if he knows how to dream big, to dream soft, to dream of Sakura sitting at his kitchen table with a smile on his lips.

He doesn’t know if he will survive it, not daring to try.


	4. rust between my teeth but i still smile

Sakura is not in love, and so there is no reason for her to press a hand to her sternum, as if to dull the sudden pain when she hears Ino say, “Really, Shikamaru, just because you and Temari didn’t work out doesn’t mean you should just let your clan elders bully you into marriage with some political prospect. Are you stupid in addition to lazy? You’ll be miserable.”

“Ino,” Shikamaru sighs, bored and half-heartedly, “both our parents had political marriages, and they were perfectly happy together. This way, the clan elders stay happy, too.”

“If you say ‘less troublesome’,” Ino threatens, “I will stab you.”

Sakura loses track of them after that, pressing her back against the wall and trying to remember how to breathe.

What does it matter? They’ve never been anything real. They’ve never been anything.

Sakura is not is love, and her heart is not breaking in her chest.

Shikamaru submits to her shoving him further into a chair with a chuckle, and Sakura bites him for it, for his amusement, for the darkness around them, for the way she won’t leave any permanent marks on him because he isn’t hers to claim. He submits, and she’s furious with it, with the control he gives over to her, for what he doesn’t give over to her, for the way she can steal this kiss and this fuck and this moment in an empty room with no one to hear them, with no one to know.

She can’t even leave bruises on him, because no one is to know.

She’d demanded that.

Said, “This is just between us, right? This doesn’t mean anything.”

Shikamaru hadn’t even paused, hadn’t stuttered, agreed with the way he threaded his fingers through hers and pushed her further into the wall.

None of this means anything.

Sakura is not in love.

Dawn will bloom and the shadows will melt under the new day and Sakura will move forward into the future that is rushing forward, the future she is building, the future she doesn’t know what to do with.

She didn’t want this to mean anything.

And so it doesn’t.

It can’t.

She won’t let it.

She can’t have it.

Shikamaru kisses her softly in the moonlight of her bedroom, once across her cheek, once across her mouth, and then he’s gone.

Sakura lies still, sprawled across her rumpled sheets, cooling in the night, and realizes she can’t afford to let him kiss her ever again.

She would not survive it.

There’s nothing she cannot survive.

Sakura won’t be unmade by a boy with dark eyes who doesn’t want her.Not again.

She is deathless, screaming towards immortality, and of all the things she’ll rule over, love will never be one of them.

Sakura is not in love.

She could not survive it.

It is surprisingly easy to unmake herself.

At least, this time, it is for herself.

Shikamaru looks shocked, like she’s plunged a blade through his chest, and victory looks like all his brilliance not enough to overcome her cruelty, tastes like ashes and antiseptic soap and iron.

Victory is the furious, shamed blush on Shikamaru’s cheeks when Sakura neatly sidesteps his attempts to corner her into speaking.

“This,” she will not tell him, “this is what it feels like to be betrayed.”

Sakura is not in love.

A woman in love would not try to hurt him so badly.

Maybe she’ll be a goddess of vengeance.

Ha, look at that, maybe she is more Sasuke’s teammate than she ever thought.

And, oh, wouldn’t that just burn in Shikamaru’s veins.

She’ll never tell him.

Sakura is a healer.

She knows exactly how much easier it is to kill.

Shikamaru watches her across a meeting room table, all his cold calculation stripped from him, and this, she thinks, this is all the ways life is unfair.

It never meant anything.

Sakura is a healer.

Sakura is not in love.

She wonders when she started lying to herself again.


	5. my burdens to your feet

“You don’t owe me anything,” Sakura tells him, her chin high and her eyes far away, too far away to catch.

“Sakura,” Shikamaru says, broken and sad and aching with the weight of all that distance, “of course I do.”

He doesn’t know the words to say “as human beings we owe each other the basics of compassion and decency, and I have known you almost all my life, it is impossible to fully encompass what I owe you, here, at the end of it all”.

Or maybe he does know the words but is too much of a coward. Or maybe he does know the words but they aren’t enough, will never be enough, nothing will ever be enough for Shikamaru to hold his heart in his bare hands and offer it up to her.

It doesn’t matter, anyways. Sakura holds it regardless.

So Shikamaru says, “I am not a stupid man, Sakura, and I have never sought to be cruel, but I have been a liar and a killer and you know this, but you never should have known this.”

Or, well, Shikamaru says, because he is not a romantic, he is not a poet, he has never had the right words when it came down to it, “I should have been honest from the start, Sakura, but I didn’t think you wanted my honesty.”

Look at the two of them.

Liars and killers. Thieves.

“We both should have been honest, Sakura,” Shikamaru says. “And you can hate me forever, after this, but first let me tell you that I am— That I— That I love you.”

Or, well, Shikamaru means to say it, except Sakura punches him in the face, first.

“Chōji,” Shikamaru says, staring at the blank ceiling of the hospital, “I don’t know how to fix this.”

Chōji was born to stand in front of Ino and Shikamaru and shield their bodies from harm. He rests a large, warm hand on Shikamaru’s ankle. It’s comforting, and it fixes nothing, and Shikamaru wants to cry.

Chōji wouldn’t have hurt Sakura the way Shikamaru has hurt Sakura.

He wouldn’t have ever thought to, but he also wouldn’t have ever gotten the chance.

Shikamaru’s spent almost twenty years trying to figure Sakura out.

He wonders how he missed this.

He wonders if he didn’t miss it at all.

Shikamaru had always hated and resented Sasuke in equal measure—the way Sakura turned into something else around him, over-bright and dimmed, holding her heart out over and over again only to watch it drop to the floor.

There was something so cruel to it, Sasuke’s reluctance to take responsibility for his own indifference.

There was something so cruel to it, Sakura’s inability to stop herself.

Shikamaru’s spent almost twenty years trying to figure Sakura out.

He wonders if he didn’t succeed.

It’s become second nature, to exploit an enemy’s weaknesses in the field.

And aren’t they all just what the war made them?

And aren’t they all just still the same children, screaming for recognition?

“Chōji,” Shikamaru begs, “how do I fix this?”

Chōji thinks for a long moment. “Sakura isn’t something that needs fixing, Shikamaru. What do you want?”

And, well. What does Shikamaru want?

He is his mother’s son.

He is his father’s son.

He wants to do his clan proud, protect his village, shape the world into something softer. He wants to pull out rot and pay for old sins and give his children something hopeful. He wants to sit on the porch of his home one day, arthritis in his joints and grey in his hair, and hold the hand of someone he loves, press a kiss to their jaw as they watch night fall over the peace they have built together.

Shikamaru wants many things.

There is a list of names on his kitchen table. He doesn’t want any of them.

“Ah,” he sighs.

Chōji smiles at him, at that, soft and a little sad and wise enough to make Shikamaru weep. “You’ll figure it out. I know you will.”

Ino barges into the room, ranting about how she’ll show Shikamaru the meaning of pain, and he laughs and laughs and laughs because he loves them, because he’s in love, because he’s a fool and a coward and a liar and a killer, because his name is Nara Shikamaru and all his parents ever wanted for him was his happiness.

He wonders how he could have ever forgotten that his happiness was not his alone, but his to share.

“Leave,” Sakura orders.

She doesn’t look up from her paperwork.

Shikamaru closes her office door behind him and presses his back against it, so as to not invade her space any more than he must. “I will,” he says, “in a minute. Just, Sakura—“

His voice almost breaks, but she doesn’t look up, so he presses on.

“I’m not marrying any of them, Sakura. And you weren’t alone, in it all. You weren’t just something to pass the time with. I know we never promised anything different, I know you never expected anything different, but you deserve to know. I meant it, all of it.”

He doesn’t say “I love you.”

Sakura wouldn’t want to hear it.

Maybe she’s never wanted to hear it.

She’s never told him what she wanted.

All Shikamaru can give her is the truth.

Sakura isn’t something for him to fix.

All Shikamaru can do is reach for a better tomorrow. All Shikamaru can do is hope.

He owes her that.

He owes himself that.

This is not duty, this is grace.

Shikamaru walks out of Sakura’s office, and tries not to wonder if she looks up.


	6. the stars are laughing

Sakura doesn’t want to listen, but Shikamaru says “I know we never promised anything different, I know you never expected anything different, but you deserve to know,” and it’s like a slap to the face.

She wonders when she became this woman.

She’s been many things, but she’s never been cruel, before.

Shikamaru promised her nothing but dark corners and the clash of mouths and she asked for nothing more, made no indication that she ever wanted more.

Shikamaru isn’t a mindreader. And how could he have known, when Sakura was hiding even from herself?

All it would have taken to end it would have been to tell him. Shikamaru would have given her the space to lick her wounds, he wouldn’t have tormented her with them.

Sakura once held her heart out, again and again, to a boy who had not interest in reaching out to take it.

No wonder it kept shattering on the floor.

She wonders when she became the type of woman to use love as a weapon, to profane something so holy.

Sakura has always lied to herself.

She’d thought she’d finally stopped.

Shikamaru is not Sasuke, is not her betrayer.

Sakura had thought she’d stopped betraying herself.

Six years on, and she’s still standing on battlefields of her own making.

She wonders when she’ll finally learn to put the blade in her hands down. Let that shatter on the floor, for once.

Sakura feels like all the colour has leeched out of her by the time she’s finished spilling her guts to Ino, as if Ino could give her some form of absolution.

She tenses, waiting for Ino to walk away.

Sakura would never blame her for choosing Shikamaru.

“Oh Sakura,” Ino sighs, and leans forward to press a fierce kiss to Sakura’s forehead, right along the hairline, “one day you’re going to stop doing violence against yourself and learn to let hurt go.”

Sakura closes her eyes tight against the tears, tight against Ino’s blessing and curse, tight against the love Ino has always raged so terribly with, which wraps Sakura up and refuses to let her fall.

“It doesn’t all have to be so hard,” Ino promises her.

Sakura wishes she could believe it.

Sakura is no goddess: an altar cradled in the valley of her thighs or blood sacrifices to her feet.

She breathes, intercostals contracting, her rib cage expanding, staring her green eyes down in the mirror.

Her cheeks are tearstained and she’s flushed with her grief, with her remorse, with her violence.

Sakura is just human.

She tongues the wound in her cheek where she’s worried through the skin, tastes blood.

She’s just human.

Maybe that is enough for forgiveness.

Sakura swings her feet out of bed and braces for the cold, braces for the new day, braces for beginnings and endings.

Physician, she thinks, heal thineself.

Shikamaru opens the door to his house, his shoulders rounded with some weight, but his dark eyes clear like a moonlit night.

“Sakura,” he says.

Sakura is no goddess. This is grace.


	7. tomorrow will betray us

Radiance is the way the sunlight pours through the windows in Shikamaru’s kitchen and sets Sakura’s hair to glowing in the late afternoon light.

She’s focused down and in on her teacup, and Shikamaru has half a mind to wonder if he could scoop the sun out of the air to sweeten their tea.

She hasn’t said anything since he let her in the door, simply quietly accepted the offer of tea with a nod, let her crawl into a chair at the kitchen table, and waited.

Shikamaru isn’t sure what they’re waiting for. Their courage, maybe. He is content to wait. To let this moment stretch out to the edge of forever: Sakura hunched over a cup of tea and the air golden.

He doesn’t wonder if he’ll ever get this again.

It is enough that he gets this. Gets her. Sakura in the sunlight his kitchen, if only for this moment.

No shadows in sight.

“Ah,” Sakura finally sighs.

Shikamaru straightens and tries to pretend he’s not readying himself for a blow.

“So,” Sakura says, swirling her teacup between her palms. “I think I made a terrible mistake and went and fell in love with you.”

Oh.

Oh.

She’s the bravest thing he’s ever seen as she looks up, fear in those green eyes, wary and wry and wonderful.

Shikamaru fought a war with this woman. He’s bled and nearly died with this woman. Watched this woman scream and fight and rage against the end of everything.

She once pulled a sword out of her ribcage with one wretched, awful scream and proceeded to turn the blade on her enemy and decapitate him with it. She’d stood over him afterwards, panting, and not made a sound as she’d forced her body to heal the hole skewering her to the sky.

He’s never seen her scared like this.

Sakura laughs, soft and worn and bitter. “I know, me, the girl who couldn’t let Sasuke go—afraid of love,” she says, reading his mind, not at all reading his mind. “I fucked up, Shikamaru. Shit, I’m so sorry, you never asked for any of this.”

She stands, abruptly, as if to leave, as if to run, and Shikamaru jumps to his feet, his chair falling behind him because he can’t— she can’t— it can’t end like this.

“Sakura,” he says, hands on her elbows, trying to keep her here, trying to keep her, “no. No. Oh, no, no, don’t you ever believe you’re alone in this.”

He could cry, for how that cracks her open.

“What?”

Sakura shakes her head, trying to shake off his words, and he can’t let her. No. She has to listen. She has to understand.

Shikamaru could not bear it if her own fears ruined her.

It’s one thing if she doesn’t want him, after all the ruin that lies between them now.

It is another if she simply cannot stay long enough to hear him.

“Sakura,” Shikamaru says, not pulling her closer, not pulling her in, just holding her, just for a moment, “I fell in love with you, too.”

Sakura’s mouth wavers, and then collapses, like a dam giving out before a flood.

Shikamaru opens his arms and Sakura falls into him, swept away.

The air is golden and honey-sweet. It does little to sweeten his tears as they fall, weeping, to their knees.

Sakura’s hands tighten in the weave of his shirt and Shikamaru presses his lips to her temple.

They are shaken. They are unmade.

They are ending and they are beginning.

Eventually, Shikamaru carries her into his living room and curls himself around her on the couch, pressed forehead and chest and belly and thighs and knees, Shikamaru’s hands grounding on her back.

Sakura doesn’t have it in her to resist.

She doesn’t want to.

For the first time in too long, she surrenders.

“What about your clan elders?” she asks, when she has finally rounded up the perimeter of her bravery. “I bring nothing with me, not even my name.”

Shikamaru’s face stays relaxed, his gaze steady on her.

“The elders understand duty,” he says, “but they understand love, too. And, Sakura, you are not a burden.”

Sakura inhales sharply through her nose, and tries not to claw at that blade.

“This isn’t a transaction. This isn’t about what you can give me.”

Sakura was a believer, once.

She doesn’t have to wonder where she lost that wide-eyed hope.

She wonders when she will stop making her life a sacrifice to her deepest fears, trying to appease all the women she has always known she’ll never be.

“I love you,” Shikamaru tells her, heart wide open, “that’s all there is.”

She wonders if that can be enough.

Sakura thinks about living a life of fear and violence and lies, of never being enough and of always wanting more than she dares to hold.

She thinks she could live a life hoping that it is enough.

Maybe one day, she’ll be a believer again.

Maybe one day, she’ll believe herself worthy of it.

She steels her courage, whatever is left of it and her.

“What if I want more than just love in the shadows?” she whispers, as if to say it louder would be to invite it to evaporate.

Shikamaru smiles at her, tender and sad and so much hope she wants to kiss it from him, make it her own. “All you ever had to do was ask,” Shikamaru says. “I’m yours. You have me. I hope it can be enough.”

She does, then, kiss it from him, make it her own.

A promise.

“Yes,” Sakura whispers.

To Shikamaru. To the universe.

Night is closing in on this room, on this house, on Konoha.

Maybe they won’t make it past the dawn.

Sakura doesn’t know.

But she has to try.

She has to hope.

Here is love.

Here is grace.

Shikamaru kisses her like she is something solid and unlikely to fall away.

Sakura meets him in return.

That’s all there is.


End file.
